Home mining vs Hosted mining

What's the better option for beginners: mining from home or using a hosted service?

Your question lack many details. For example, what is electricity rate on your area? Which hosted mining you're talking about?. But assuming backyard means outdoor area (which isn't good for ASIC due to higher humidity) and you're not willing to learn about setup/maintain your ASIC, hosted mining is better option. I never use hosted mining service, but few service require you to do things on your side. For example, sending ASIC to their farm building or choosing your own pool.

I will start with the fact that in both cases you have to know very good what you're doing. Hosted mining can easily scam you, since you never touch the actual miner; and if you by chance thought on cloud mining, that's scam from start. Then, mining at home depends on the electricity prices in the fist place then on the fact the miner should stay in a cool, dry and clean place, with very good power wiring, good internet and, if it's too close to you then you may need to also handle the noise. Plus you have to research and learn a little, but people around here will help you with that part.

In most cases and for most people, simply buying bitcoin is always better, but to answer your question, your backyard is a lot safer than any hosting company. It is pretty known the most hosting companies are just scammers or rekless, even the most famous ones can get you rekt, you can search compass mining and how they screwed with their clients, in Russia and now recently Canada. Hosting your miner somewhere you don't own is like keeping your crypto on an exchange, while that gives you more features and less fees, there is always a huge risk of losing everything.

useless comments of accounts created specifically to sponsor a company. Cloud mining is a scam.

Your question is without many details and there is just a title. But I want to say that Cloud minings are Scam and there are only digits in the Website and nothing else. And also If you have much more money than you can just Go for https://masternodes.online Cause here you can find better nodes that will earn free ways of earnings to you. Dash Coin is leading in master nodes and has 6% APY per year and is great.